Click here to subscribe today or Login.
Property owners in three Back Mountain municipalities will pay $60 more next year for residential structures and $120 more for commercial properties as part of a new stormwater mandate, according to the Dallas Area Municipal Authority.
It’s still unclear what property owners in these municipalities — Dallas borough and Dallas and Kingston townships — will pay in 2020 and subsequent years because the 2019 amount is only temporary, said Thomas Mayka, stormwater coordinator at the authority, which is commonly known as DAMA.
The fee in 2020 will be based on the amount of nonabsorbent “impervious area” containing structures, paved parking lots and sidewalks within each parcel — analysis that has not yet been completed, Mayka said.
Without these calculations, Mayka said he cannot predict if the 2020 fee will be higher, lower or about the same.
“The bottom line is we’re in the beginning stages. We have a lot to do yet,” he said.
The fee, which takes effect Jan. 1, will fund projects to comply with a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requirement for municipalities to reduce the quantity of sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus washed into the Susquehanna River and other waterways that feed into the Chesapeake Bay.
Officials in the three municipalities chose to address the mandate by participating in a joint plan under DAMA, believing it would be more cost efficient than handling the work on their own or joining a regional compliance program handled by the Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority.
Mayka said Monday he expects his authority’s fee will be “comparable” to the one being charged by the Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority.
The owners of 80,408 parcels in 32 municipalities in the Wyoming Valley authority’s program received advance billing notices last week informing them of its new stormwater fee, which also takes effect Jan. 1.
Unlike DAMA, the Wyoming Valley Sanitary Authority already calculated the impervious square footage based on aerial photography and mapping data. Its annual fee amounts based on the following ranges of impervious area: 100 to 499 square feet, $12; 500 to 6,999 square feet, $57.60; 7,000 square feet or more, $1.70 for each 1,000 square foot of impervious area.
Back Mountain specifics
Until the data is ready to calculate the permanent fee, the Dallas Area Municipal Authority opted to charge property owners for the stormwater program based on customers’ sewer/solid waste units in 2019, Mayka said.
Most residential properties have one unit, which equates to $5 per month, or $60 annually, he said. Commercial properties typically have two units, resulting in double the charge, he said.
There are 11,025 deeded properties in the three municipalities, but undeveloped ones with no structures will not be charged a stormwater fee, Mayka said.
He estimated 6,600 to 6,900 properties will be charged the fee, including schools, churches and nonprofits, he said.
All fee revenue will be deposited into a segregated stormwater “enterprise fund” that can only be spent on projects and programs associated with meeting the federal mandate, Mayka said.
Only a “small portion” of these funds will be used for administration, according to the authority’s stormwater section at www.damaonline.org.
The authority is still developing projects that may be completed to meet the federal mandate, he said. One possibility is refurbishing a stormwater structure at a a small municipal-owned park in Dallas Township. The initial focus will be on municipal sites because it will be reduce the need to obtain permission from private property owners, he said.
Most Luzerne County municipalities are in watersheds that drain into the Susquehanna, which flows over 400 miles from its origin near Cooperstown, New York, and empties into the northern part of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
The U.S. EPA’s Chesapeake Bay plan requires states to reduce the amount of nutrients and sediment in waterways that feed into the bay. Pennsylvania comprises 35 percent of the entire Chesapeake Bay Watershed, according to the state.
The state also has cracked down on farms, stepping up enforcement of a requirement to develop agricultural plans aimed at reducing soil erosion and keeping manure away from streams, officials have said.